Azure is where Microsoft is spending a lot of its efforts lately. Microsoft is dedicated to making Azure a success. As someone who started working with Azure a little in the early days, I can say that it’s come a long way, and offers a remarkable set of services at good prices.

But not everyone is on board with Azure or even with cloud computing yet. If you haven’t yet dipped your toe into the Azure pool, but are curious, this blog post is for you.

What is cloud computing? What is Azure?

Cloud computing basically means that instead of running applications in your own data center, you run it in someone else’s data center. Why would I do that?

Running a data center is difficult and expensive. You have to purchase hardware, manage upgrades, security, networking, and even stuff like electricity, ventilation, and cooling. For some enterprises, this is either not a big deal or it’s worth the hassle. But for many enterprises, the value that you’re delivering is not in the hardware or the operating system and so on, but in the domain expertise that goes into the software you’re building. Then, cloud appeals to enterprises who would rather someone else handle all that other stuff.

A metaphor that I really like was written up by Albert Barron in a blog post called Pizza as a Service (I especially like the diagram). It makes sense for a pizza company to control the whole stack because pizza making is their core competency. But if pizza making isn’t your job, it makes sense to take another option, like dining out, so you can instead spend your time focusing on what you do best.

This isn’t to say that cloud is always the best solution, but it explains why many companies are choosing to move at least some of their infrastructure and platform to a cloud provider like Microsoft’s Azure.

How do I sign up for Azure?

If you’re on the fence, I recommend at least giving it a try, so that you’re prepared for the day that your CTO comes to you and asks "so what are we doing about the cloud?"

Signing up for Azure is easy.

Create Microsoft account

To start, you’ll need a Microsoft account. If you don’t already have one, you can signup here. It’s free, and you can use it in a bunch of other places later, even if you end up not liking Azure.

Create Azure account

Next, go to azure.microsoft.com and create a free account. Signing up with that link will give you $200 in free credit to use on Azure services. You do need to use a credit card to sign up, but it is just for verifying your identity (they don’t want a bunch of spammers and bitcoin bots). Microsoft will not charge you until you say so.

Speaking of money, there are some things you can do in Azure that are absolutely free. But, running Couchbase Server currently requires you to provision Virtual Machines, so if you want to play with Couchbase, you will put that $200 to good use.

Couchbase and Azure: Is $200 enough?

When I first started with Azure, I was very worried that I’d run up a big tab if I wasn’t careful. With the $200 trial, you won’t get charged until you explicitly tell Microsoft to do so. But years later, after my initial trial, I’ve still never had a problem of an unexpectedly high bill.

Quotas

I’ve never had this problem because:

a) Azure services are very reasonably priced, and

b) Microsoft makes it hard to hop on a runaway train of spending money.

In fact, almost a year ago, I was tasked with provisioning a medium-sized cluster of Couchbase nodes on some very beefy Virtual Machines. Lots of RAM, lots of processor cores, 10 total virtual machines all running Couchbase. I started doing this (manually, to begin with) and discovered that Azure actually has a quota that limits the number of cores you can provision. If you want to create a huge Couchbase cluster, you’ll first need to request an increase in the limit on the number of cores and/or virtual machines that you are allowed to have (this is a manual process, again to avoid abuse/surprises/exploitation/etc).

Because of that, I realized that even if I had created an experimental automated script that I accidentally asked to create 100 machines instead of 10, Azure would stop me.

It cost how much?

Until you want to build that huge cluster, you probably won’t need more than $200 to start with, and you won’t need to increase your quota.

As an example, I ran a single-node Couchbase Server on a low-end virtual machine within the last 30 days. I must have provisioned, used it, and tore it down 3 or 4 times. As you can see from the below screenshot of my billing statement, it cost me a grand total of $0.11 for an hour and a half of VM time (and I think there are a few pennies for related services, not shown).

(Some information blurred to protect the innocent).

Your mileage will vary, but my point is that I think you will find it more challenging to use up that $200 credit than you think.

More than enough to get started with Couchbase

Also, watch this short instructional video on how to provision Couchbase Server clusters automatically. You don’t have to provision a Virtual Machine, install Couchbase, do the initial cluster setup, network them together, etc manually. This video (courtesy of Ben Lackey from the Couchbase Partners team) shows you how to provision a Couchbase Server cluster from the Azure Marketplace.

Summary

If you’ve never used Azure or any cloud computing, now is your chance to get started. I’d love to hear about your experiences with Azure, with Couchbase, and your overall impressions of cloud computing. Please leave a comment below, or talk to me on Twitter @mgroves.

Azure Functions are Microsoft’s answer to Amazon’s Lambdas or Google’s Cloud Functions (aka "serverless" architecture). They give you a way to deploy small pieces of code, and let Azure handle the underlying server. I’ve never used them before, so I thought I would give them a try beyond "Hello, World", by getting them to work with Couchbase Server.

Getting setup to develop Azure Functions

But it only works for the preview version at this time. You don’t have to use these tools to develop Azure Functions, but it made the process simpler for me.

Once I had this tooling in place, all I had to was to File→New→Project. Then under "Cloud", select "Azure Functions".

Once you do this, you’ll have an empty looking project with a couple of JSON files. Right click on the project, add item, and select "Azure Function".

Next, you’ll need to select what kind of Azure Function you want to create. I chose "HttpTrigger". I also chose "Anonymous" to keep this post simple, but depending on your use case, you may want to require an authentication token. After you do this, a very simple shell of a function will be generated (as a C# class). You can execute this function locally (indeed, that is what the local.settings.json file is for) so you can test it out without deploying to Azure yet.

Writing a "Get" function

First, I decided that I wanted two Azure Functions: one to "get" a piece of data by ID, and one to "set" a new piece of given data. I started by defining the shape of my data with a simple C# POCO:

At this point, most of this code should be familiar if you’ve used Couchbase Server and the Couchbase .NET SDK before. I’m connecting to a single node cluster, and then connecting a bucket that has a password set (I’m using Couchbase Server 4.6).

But, the important thing to point out here is the use of Configuration.AppSettings. In the local.settings.json file, I’ve added these Couchbase settings to the Value section:

When running Azure Functions locally, this file is used for configuration. I have Couchbase Server running locally with a bucket called "azurefunctions". Anything in "Values" can be accessed via Configuration.AppSettings.

Deploying to Azure

Before deploying the Azure Functions, I’ll need to create a Couchbase Cluster on Azure. This is very easy to do, thanks to Ben Lackey’s great work on the Azure Marketplace. Once that’s deployed, deploying the Azure Functions are also easy, thanks to Visual Studio.

Deploying Couchbase Server to Azure

Here is a short video walking you through the process of creating a Couchbase Server cluster on Azure.

For my example, I followed that video closely. Here is step 1, where I configure the username, password, and resource group.

For the second step, I only created a single node cluster on the smallest, cheapest VM (DS1 v2). I created 0 Sync Gateway nodes, since I’m not using Sync Gateway for this example.

Step 3 is just a summary, and step 4 is a confirmation. It will take 3-5 minutes for the Couchbase Cluster to start up in Azure.

Deploying Azure Functions to Azure

Now, Couchbase Server is running. So let’s deploy the Azure Functions that will interact with it.

To begin, right-click the project in Visual Studio and select "publish". You’ll need to create a new publish profile the first time you do this, but that’s easy.

Give your functions an app name, select a subscription, select a resource group (you can create a new one, or use the same group that you created above for Couchbase), select a service plan, and finally a storage account. You can create new ones when necessary.

Click "create" and these items will start to be created in Azure (it may take a minute or two).

Trying out the Azure Functions

Finally, remember that the Azure Functions need to know the URI, bucket name, and password in order to connect to Couchbase Server. That information is in local.settings.json, but that file is not used for actual Azure deployments.

In the Azure portal, navigate to the Azure function (I called mine cbazurefunctions), and then select "Application Settings". Under "App settings", enter those three settings: couchbaseUri, couchbaseBucketName, and couchbaseBucketPassword.